Darryl Mason is an Australian writer, video maker, songwriter and music producer. He has worked with Australian bands and artists like The Angels, The Screaming Jets, Freedom Of Fire, The Plummets and the Baby Animals. His debut novel Max & Murray was published in 1996. You can find on Twitter here: @darrylmason.

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An extract from a ramble-babble I wrote in August 2006. Hadn't re-read this in a long time, but it made me smile to remember how bizarre and uminaginable it seemed in 2006 that a worldwide youth movement, driven by internet information sharing, could revolutionise the Middle East and change the face of modern global politics. And it's only begun.

Bizarre, broken, swarming with change and chaos, magic and miracles, madness and joy.

This is our world today.

But for all the cries of 'Terror!' and 'Hatred!', the divisions amongst the youth of all nations are few and far between. There has probably never been a time before in the history of our races that so few young people view war as the way to remake the world for the better.

There is another way, a hundred other ways to make it better and a few million info-rich youth-fresh brains are chewing over those ideas into the early hours while you sleep. Before you wake, they will have discussed their ideas online in front of audiences in the tens or hundreds of thousands. The ideas will spread, the good ones will stick, the brilliant ones will change minds and lives and the future, subtle brick by brick, before you even finish breakfast.

Hope then is high, regardless of what the headlines may tell you.

The war pigs of the boomer-plus generations don't seem to understand that the world they knew is drawing to a close. They want bigger armies, they want wider wars, but how do they get such things when the majority of the world's youth simply do not want to fight? When the majority of the world's people are repeatedly asking, "Sorry? You want another hundred billion to buy more weapons? What exactly will that achieve?"

The will to fight isn't gone from the youth. But the drive to fight pointless, blood-soaked wars that solve little, change nothing, destroy everything, that drive is not only gone, but it seems it will now be impossible to motivate it, or reinstate it.

The youth of our world want to fight. They want to fight for their future, but they don't want to fight each other.

At least, they don't want to fight outside of the online world. There are a million battles underway tonight in the gaming worlds of another reality, but the bodies from those wars are not piling up in the streets of our real world, and most of the hatred is short-lived and is disguised admiration for the skill of their online enemies.

This is a comment I submitted to Letters Of Note, which will make more sense if you look over the Philip K Dick letters first. It didn't get published at LoN because, as you can see below, it was too long :

Philip K Dick and his second wife were approached in the mid-1950s by FBI agents who, like in films and fiction, turned up on their doorstep in suits and hats and tried to recruit them, to help save America from communists and the enemy within. They were told they could study for free on the FBI dime at a university in Mexico, they'd just have to report back on what political activities, movements and ideologies were gaining in popularity amongst the student body. They refus…

I can't think of a more Australian subject to begin posting stories from my archive of interviews with more than 400 musicians, singers, songwriters than this from 1988, when The Radiators briefly decided to abandon playing their biggest hit, as they struggled to find "a new direction."

I wrote this for a magazine I worked for in St Mary's, New South Wales, when I was 18-19, called The Eagle Magazine.
I wasn't sure what would be suitable for a "family magazine" distributed across huge parts of New South Wales, so the Editor said, "Just write it all." This was my first draft. Only about half of what I coyly submitted made it into print, for obvious reasons.
If I find the original magazine when it was published, I'll add an image for comparison.
------------------- The Radiators - Interview With Geoff Turner, 1988
THE RADIATORS DITCH 'GIMME HEAD' LIVE – AUGUST 1988
Think of a nightclub, a pub, a front bar almost anywhere in Australia…